In the first episode of our series, expert Brad Tabone with HammerTech shares his observations about how international companies are approaching safety differently than many North American companies. He’ll also share specific examples of how these companies are using the leading edge of safety technology to reduce risk, what the future of safety looks like from a regulatory and technological standpoint — and how companies can best capitalize on these trends today.
Bryan Kopta:
The construction industry has a big problem on its hands, and it's called safety. Just how big is this problem? The federal government estimates the total cost of fatal and nonfatal injuries at a whopping $11 billion each year. That's a 15% of the cost for all private industry. The average cost per case of fatal or nonfatal injury is $27,000, and that's almost double the per case cost of $15,000 for all industries. It gets worse. One in every 10 construction workers is injured annually, and construction sees nonfatal injury rates that are 71% higher than any other industry. Clearly, the industry needs to do better with safety. It turns out, looking at how international contracting firms are handling safety is a great place to start. That's because, unlike the US, where companies typically react to injuries, many other countries have stricter enforcements, which has forced them to adopt more proactive safety measures.
Bryan Kopta:
These firms are also using smart, new data and technology solutions that actually help prevent injuries and even predict risk. Understanding this new paradigm and exploring how international contractors are using it on the ground will be our topic for this episode of the Safe and Sound: Elevating the Conversation Around Construction Safety podcast series. I'm your host, Bryan Kopta, and I'm pleased to be joined today by a guest who has a really great firsthand perspective on this topic. Brad Tabone is co-founder and executive vice president of North America for HammerTech. An entrepreneur with a passion for business improvement through the use of technology and process engineering, Brad has 10 years experience working within the financial services industry, business improvement, business intelligence, operations transformation, and project management. Hi, Brad. How's it going?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah, really good. Friday, end of the week, so no complaints at all. How are you?
Bryan Kopta:
Good, good. I am very well. Brad, before we get started, I have to get this out of the way. Astute listeners may have picked up on your Australian accent, and I don't know about them, but every time I hear that accent, I can't help thinking of Crocodile Dundee. Do you get that a lot?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. I mean, I've been living in America now for 2.5 years and, yeah, I get that a lot. I would rather people call out Thor or Wolverine.
Bryan Kopta:
I know. Let me ask that again. Do you get the Chris Hemsworth a lot?
Brad Tabone:
All the time. No, no, no. The best thing, though, that I generally do, is just continue on with the little joke and banter, and then get them to quote me some stuff in Crocodile Dundee and just look at the cringe-worthy attempts at the Australian accent. It seems that, all across the world, nobody can really do our accent very well. So, it's actually amusing hearing other people try and do it. But yes, no, I don't get the Chris Hemsworth-y thing. That would be awesome.
Bryan Kopta:
Well, so anyway, back to safety, Brad, tell us some of your observations from visiting international contractors and how they're handling safety differently than their North American counterparts.
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. Look, over the last probably three years so I moved here, obviously, just over two years ago, but I spent probably six to seven months in the previous years before that, both here in the United States and also in some parts of Asia, looking at what are the various safety systems and where could our, does our system have international chances or application? And I guess the main areas that differentiate that I saw was around the actual safety management systems of the country. So, the regulators, for instance, like your OSHA, for instance, has OHSAS 18001. It's very much a risk transfer, in my opinion, base model. Whereas, in other countries like, say, Australia or the UK, it's around risk management and really utilizing management at the company to manage that risk.
I would say that the social side of the country, their legal, their regulators, the way that the country is set up from a capitalist perspective, et cetera, also drives different changes, so things like near-miss management. In some countries, near misses have to be logged with the regulator, and it's the same, you could go to jail if you don't. And then, here in America, you can have a near miss and you don't even need to log it. That should change. Modular design, some countries are obviously leading the way in modular. There's modular and every single country, but where that modular industry is, when it started and where it's up to now, there's a fair bit of change. And the last one's probably around that legal liability side of things. Some countries are very punitive if something happens, and other countries are very much punitive before something happens, if you're not managing something right. So, they're probably the major changes or differences between countries that I see.
Bryan Kopta:
I see. You mentioned risk transfer earlier. For those of us who don't know, what exactly is that?
Brad Tabone:
Instead of taking a risk management approach, which is... Picture a GC-1, and it's a GC out of the UK, and they hire a subcontractor that is going to be excavating, and excavator comes onto site. Generally, what I've seen from here in the US, in my experience, to give you a clear example would be, a GC here would not necessarily go out and check that piece of excavator and make sure that it's got all the right servicing history, load charts, et cetera. They would rely on the subcontractor because they've contracted the risk and liability associated with that, that that subcontractor knows what they're doing or that trade partner knows what they're doing. And if something happened, they would have a good case of saying, "Well, no. We've hired a specialist and they didn't do their job. Therefore, it's not our fault," as a GC.
Brad Tabone:
Whereas, in the UK, they would have a responsibility as a manager to enforce some minimum requirements, and if that excavator got brought onto site, that GC would verify that XYZ is in place. I'm not saying they take total control of the management of it, but there's some clear risks associated that they would be responsible for, and verifying that, before that escalator can be used, that it's got those things in place. That's the difference between a risk management style, in my opinion, versus a risk transfer style here. Yeah. But it comes down to the litigation and all sorts of other legal frameworks within countries, but that's exactly the differences that legal frameworks have on the actual way that risk is managed.
Bryan Kopta:
That makes sense. Back to what you were saying before, what would you say is the biggest difference between how the US, Europe, Australia, and developing countries approach safety?
Brad Tabone:
Well, I definitely would say that the risk transfer of this and the risk management. In my opinion, it's that, plus some other things, like the fatality rate, for instance. You've got fatality rates in the United States, and you can pick various years or various statistics, but it ranges anywhere between, say, nine to 11 out of 100,000 workers. Canada's up there still, eight to nine, whereas you start looking at countries like, say, the UK, they're down to 1.31. You look at Australia, they rate between two and three, which is still a third from a fatality rate. I don't like to generally quote rates of serious injuries or lost time injury rates or near-miss rates, because there are stats that are very easy to not report or not report accurately or, depending on the country, have different reasons to report or not report.
Whereas, fatality rates are something, I think, that are something that A, are a shame and disturbing, but at the same time, an accurate measurement, I guess, of a safety management's performance outcome. And they do, obviously, vary across the world, but that there being the fatality rate is the outcome of the differences of, I believe and again, my own opinion, of management styles, of risk. I mean, even with OSHA, we saw a couple of months ago with them putting a note out to the industry that they're moving away from traditional. They're trying to move away from traditional incident rate reporting only, and they want companies to start looking at lead measurements and lead activities, and start taking a little bit more of that proactive approach.
I've also seen that in the industry over the last two or three years. So, even though there hasn't necessarily been a regulator saying you have to do it, we're starting to see that shift over here as well towards that proactive management style, and not just doing what typically is my responsibility as dictated per X law, but actually doing the right thing around risk management. So, yeah, that's probably the difference, the biggest difference that I see here. Safety's seen as more of, "They're the safety people on site, so they should do it," rather than, "Everybody's responsible for safety and everyone's got a responsibility for safety." It is changing, but that's the biggest difference I see worldwide.
People are understanding that if they spend the time and the effort up front, they actually can run a more productive job site, and instead of safety being cost-prohibitive, it can actually be a cost center where they're running jobs better, faster, less incidents, less stoppages, better profit margins, and ultimately, safer sites.
Bryan Kopta:
Proactive versus reactive safety, how are different regulatory environments affecting companies' willingness to approach safety differently?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. I mean, even within inside the United States, which I always say is 52 different countries, you have a different even application here. I mean, you got Cal/OSHA, then you've got the New York Department of Building, then you've got OSHA federally, et cetera, right? And you have a big difference between how a site is regulated and the impacts that has on safety in New York versus, say, a project in Austin, Texas, right? There's different resourcing for that regulator. Some of our clients have stated that they get visited up to, say, twice a week sometimes in New York, citing, "Has that worker got the right safety credentials or training? Has that worker got the right certifications? When were they orientated?" et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas, I've spoken to people in other states where they haven't seen an inspector for 20 years.
In Australia, just in my home state of Victoria, which has a population of, I'll probably get this wrong, but I'm going to say a population of, say, six, seven million. They've got 90 to 100 just construction safety inspectors that go around to job sites, right?
Bryan Kopta:
Wow. That's impressive.
Brad Tabone:
So, that resourcing allows them to be proactive rather than reactive. So, instead of coming down hard, which we do in that state, of just, I'm not going to comment from a opinion perspective what I think of it, but they've just added mandatory manslaughter jail time, right? So, I would say that's more punitive. If someone dies on the job site and there's any responsibility that wasn't done properly, people from that company will go to jail, whereas the United States seems to be much more financially punitive, and because the resourcing necessarily isn't there across all the states, there isn't that ability to be proactive and visit sites and just make sure things are being done properly.
I'd say the last biggest difference is probably the way that unions are in, say, Australia versus United States. The union presence in Australia, they work like a regulator almost, in that they really do act on. They get deeply involved in each site's safety management process. So, again, that forces your employers and your GCs to follow the safety reasons. And they have, under our Australian law, the ability to go onto a site, visit it, inspect it, if they believe there to be a safety issue or ones reported to them by their members. And they actually have the power to shut down a site as well.
Bryan Kopta:
Oh, wow.
Brad Tabone:
So, you've got multi-tiered bodies. You got the regulator, then a non-regulator, but regulator. So, that comes with its own bunch of problems, and I'm not saying that one system is better than the next, but they're the sort of things that I see around proactive versus reactive and the differences between the regulatory environments, both official and non-official, and the changes that that does, because it does lead to a more proactive approach to safety.
Bryan Kopta:
Do you think American companies are aware of the data that perhaps suggests that proactive safety has such a great effect on reducing fatalities? Are they aware of that? How do they react to it?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. It's an interesting one. If you asked me that question four years ago, I would say, and again, this is only my interpretation and opinion, but for the people that I would have spoken to then, you might hear it here and there, like a safety consultant or someone that really, really takes safety seriously and is a safety professional, that are looking internationally and looking at other companies around, or they may have come from a different industry, right? For instance, generally speaking, your mining companies worldwide, which do harvest work, generally, and in Australia, it's the same thing, have a higher level of safety maturity than, as you talked about before, different industries in construction. Worldwide, construction seems to be when you're able to look at fatality rates, it's always higher than other industries.
The cost is always more than other industries as well, right? So, four years ago I would say that the maturity in the safety market here, yes, there was people thinking this, but was it a general agreed outcome? No, definitely not. But now, I would say that the shift over the last two to three years, I am meeting more and more people that do believe that proactive is the right approach, and I guess that's why, from a HammerTech perspective, if I was talking to people three or four years ago, they understood the concept, but they didn't really understand how it applied to their risk transfer or reactive way of safety or just meeting the regulator's rules. But our take-up and our use now by our clients here in the US show that and them using modules that they usually wouldn't because it usually wouldn't be their responsibility, shows there is a change.
People are understanding that if they spend the time and the effort up front, they actually can run a more productive job site, and instead of safety being cost-prohibitive, it can actually be a cost center where they're running jobs better, faster, less incidents, less stoppages, better profit margins, and ultimately, safer sites. So, it is changing. Are we there completely here yet with every person I speak to? No. But there is, yeah, people are starting to notice the trends, I think, and starting, some companies definitely that are. They're taking that leap forward to proactive safety management over the last few years ahead of the broader market.
Bryan Kopta:
Well, that's good to hear. So, on a granular level, regarding data and technology, what does that look like day-to-day on the job site?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. Again, different, right? If you look at the point solutions or the safety solutions here in North America, they're largely point solutions, and they're generally looking to solve a problem, as all technology should, that companies are facing today or companies are wanting to face or get better efficiencies around. So, the point solutions today are more aimed at your inspections, for instance, which there's some requirements to do one inspection every single week on a job site, or incident management, for instance. Whereas, when you look at preventative, what does technology usage look like on a job site? Well, it would be instead of all of your pre-safety submittal documentation either being emailed through or brought in with the crew on the day, like JJs, SDS sheets, safety plans, et cetera, that would all be submitted electronically and go through a workflow back and forth and commented on, and work between the trade partner and the GC before they come onto site.
Workers, instead of receiving 30-hour-long, hour-and-a-half-long orientation when they turn up to site, and have to write in a form all their details and certifications, all that information's already in the system. They would do a site-specific still on site because it's really important that we don't remove that human-to-human interaction on the important things, but where there is an ability to streamline a process, that would occur.
Instead of trying to find on a job site a permit form to go do a hot works, and manually write it out and hope it doesn't get dirty, you'd be doing all that electronically. A crane lift would be done electronically. Site hours would be submitted electronically. You can have your equipment registers, your pre-task plans, everything. So, when you take that reactive approach around safety and utilizing technology to streamline it, the whole purpose is, is to make proactive safety as efficient as possible because the more efficient it is, the more people will do it. If it's an inefficient, hard-to-do process, people won't do it.
So, that really is how, I would say, the biggest difference in how technology here is being utilized and how the technology market here, I guess, evolved versus in Australia evolved around safety management. And there are some tools outside of construction on safety management here in the United States that do go more broad. They're not built for the construction industry, and the nuances and idiosyncrasies of that, and that's really what we're hoping to do here.
Bryan Kopta:
So, looking into the future, what do you think it looks like from a regulatory and technological standpoint? Which country is closest to that future right now? Is there a model country that we can follow?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. I mean, look, every country does something well and done something bad, right? Let's talk about, what is safety technology and systems, right? I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff out there. I mean, there isn't just a system like HammerTech that covers all stuff. There wearables, there's image and video use, there's clash detection, AR/VR, module design, robotics. There's a whole bunch of technology now coming into the industry around each having its own merit, and each, I think the benefit is picking which of those that have merit, and ensuring that they all talk to each other and they integrate with each other, and so you're not having people having to go into different things, different modules or different systems.
If you think about the future of, say, which country is doing what I would I picture is the closest, probably is the UK, again, in my opinion. They're the country that's probably moved the fastest towards the new ISO standard, 45001, which is obviously a risk management approach. It has a very robust modular and off-site manufacturing industry because it's backed up by the government. There's certain government projects for departments that you cannot do unless they're modular. So, the government really has backed that industry. I would say Australia, a company like Hickory, for instance, construction, who has licensed its building technologies and off-site construction technologies to, say, Mace, which is one of the biggest builders in the UK, is also at the forefront of that. But in terms of that real industry take-up and government support, the UK, and then their use of technology as well, I would say, and the right technology. So, it's not about trying to use everything. It's just about what's working at the moment.
I would say, look, at the end of the day, their fatality rate is the lowest in the world, as far as I'm concerned, and their industry is quite mature across those different facets. So, as much as there are some things in America. Technology usage here in some areas of construction, like your BIM modeling, your clash detection, and the rest of it, I would say sometimes is the best-in-breed, right? But in terms of looking across regulatory, proactive versus reactive, use of technology, off-site modular, I would say probably the UK is the closest to a country that I would probably want to model myself around.
So, when you take that reactive approach around safety and utilizing technology to streamline it, the whole purpose is, is to make proactive safety as efficient as possible because the more efficient it is, the more people will do it. If it's an inefficient, hard-to-do process, people won't do it.
Bryan Kopta:
Different countries probably have different amounts of government backing and support.
Brad Tabone:
Correct.
Bryan Kopta:
Would you say that technology is really the one thing that these companies can utilize to start moving toward that future of proactive safety of lower fatalities?
Brad Tabone:
100%. I've always believed, what's in your circle of influence? Changing government regulations probably, I mean, we all have the right to vote, generally, but even when we vote, generally, we're probably not voting on what OSHA role, what, in Australia, work safety is going to be doing around government regulations, right? The country, the media, everything kind of changes that. So, that's not in my circle of influence.
What is within my circle of influence, though, is choosing how I want to manage a job site, as a company, be either proactive or reactive, and then applying technology to that to try and make that process as robust and as efficient as possible, so that people on the job site will do it. And that you then have the data, which is probably the single most important thing, because I believe you do. There's no point of changing anything in life unless you can actually measure it, and then adapt over time, because you can put the best best-in-breed practice.
For instance, one of our partners, I won't say what country it's from or what company it is, but they thought, this individual thought, and they're a very highly rated safety professional. They thought they were probably running a job site at 90 to 100% compliance to a preventative safety model, i.e., they were getting all the documentation in beforehand, they were looking at everything, every job process on site was looked at it from a preventative perspective. When they actually looked at the data, once you actually start capturing this data, and just looked at something as simple as a health check on their trade partners of who has submitted all the right documentation, what percentage and how many workers have gone through what they want from a preventative perspective before they start site, it was around 40%.
Initially, they thought there was something wrong with the data and they went back in there, and they just realized that and they turned around and said, "Well, if I think that I run a really good job site and I've got four years experience, and I've got this and this, and 25-year job experience of the top tier GCs, then what's an average site doing or a bad site doing?" So, that kind of data collection is one of the most important things from a technology standpoint that, yes, you can put in technology to help yourself, but really, unless you're measuring stuff in a consumable fashion, so not just data for the sake of data, you can't measure where you're currently at and where you need to get to. But yeah, I know. I definitely agree with your statement, which is that technology is by far the thing that is within the circle of influence to change, to change safety at any company, anywhere in the world.
Bryan Kopta:
I was going to ask one more question, and that is, you mentioned 40% is what they found. What do you think the average is, say, in the US? Do we have data on that?
Brad Tabone:
Yeah. I mean, look, it's probably in the range because, I mean, there's so many factors. There's some companies that may have collected the documentation, and their process is to scan it and store it on a hard drive within their company, or put it into Box or Dropbox on the internet, or mark it off on an Excel spreadsheet and then put that into storage. There's so many variables, and I don't like to throw that out there as any reason not to answer the question. Look, if I was to pick the compliance to the safety processes and policies that people have in place and say they should be doing on every single job site versus what they are, and this is with, or without technology, let's just say that. I would say it's probably in the range of, yeah, 25 to 40%.
Bryan Kopta:
Wow.
Brad Tabone:
Right. Today, it's hidden, and as much as people might think that they've got the most robust manual reporting and, damn, they have people spending. I know companies that have some people who have a full-time job within a business unit, so not even in a company, in a business unit, that their job is to record safety metrics or statistics on a job site, collate it all in Excel and produce huge reports and all the rest of it, which is still open to manual areas and the rest of it. But they will collect all the job sheets. They'll manually track everything, et cetera, et cetera, and I mean, they're even not hitting probably past 50, 60% because there's just a sheer amount of data coming through, and the sheer amount of processes that happen on a construction site.
I mean, you've got permits, you got [inaudible 00:25:21], you got drywall going up, you've got excavations, you've got. The amount of different processes on a job site is huge. So, things get missed, and it's not about getting to 100. I'm not a believer in zero or 100, but it really is about how do we lift from 25, 30, 40, 50% to 80, 90%? And then, the only way we'll ever get to 100 is probably via fully automated construction sites that don't have workers on them, and I don't see that in the near future at all.
Bryan Kopta:
Well, thank you so much, Brad. Now, that concludes your part as the interviewee for this podcast series. You're going to be taking over the interviewer position. So, tell us, what can we look forward to in forthcoming episodes?
Brad Tabone:
Indeed, it does. The hard job is over. Look, I'll be deep diving into three of the topics we roughly touched on today in a lot more detail. So, next month I'll be jumping into, basically, the use of construction technology and analytics at a company and doing an entire episode around that, and inviting what I believe to be one of the best-in-breed GCs here in North America to come on as the interviewee and do the hard job.
The one after that I'm going to be talking about is near misses because I think that is one of the fundamental, I guess, activities that probably I see not necessarily being utilized and investigated to the depth in which they could be and reduce the incident rate here in North America. So, I'll be picking someone worldwide that's best-in-breed or someone here. And then, lastly, is modular and off-site construction. Again, picking a worldwide leader in that and bringing them on as the interviewee and doing the easy job of just picking their brain and getting a whole bunch of gold for the audience and anybody listening to the show.
Bryan Kopta:
Great. Well, thank you so much. I know I'll be listening, and best of luck to you. Thank you so much.
Brad Tabone:
Thanks, mate. Hopefully, I did as good a job as you did.